1947 Dodge Canopy Express Truck - Garage-Found Dodge

It's not often that someone waltzes down your driveway and asks if you are interested in buying their old truck, but this is exactly what happened to Randy Carter one day. The man told Randy he had this old truck on his farm that was about 30 miles away and wanted to know if he had time to look at it. Randy is like many of us and already had his hands full with other projects, but he figured it was worth a look.

What he found sitting in a garage outside of Concord, North Carolina, that day was a rare '47 Dodge Canopy Express that had been hibernating for at least a decade. The old chicken farmer went on to say that he used it on his farm back in the day, and after it was painted he felt it was too nice to use as a work truck. Eventually it went to a local museum during the 1980s and then into the garage on the farm where it sat now with flat, rotted tires, a dead battery, frozen brakes, and a gunked-up fuel system.

The Dodge wasn't anything that Randy normally would have gone out looking for, but he knew it was something special. So he took the bait and made arrangements to haul the '47 home. The previous issues the truck had were easily remedied, except for the rebuilding of the stock brakes. Anyone reading this who has worked on a vintage Dodge truck knows how hard it is to get parts for them, and rounding up the needed brake spares was no easy task for Randy. As the fluids were changed, battery replaced, and fuel system cleaned out and revitalized, Randy washed the Dodge and found a beautiful dark blue and black two-tone paintjob under the dust of long storage that came to life after a good coat of wax.

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The other saving grace of the unusual truck was discovered in the form of an intact and quite nice vinyl-covered, wood roof skeleton much like that of a woodie. The years in the darkness of the garage were kind to the wood, including the organic bed floor, which was all luckily sealed and treated properly and possibly replaced during its restoration.

Pretty soon Randy had the 218 flathead inline-six-cylinder running like it ought to-rapping out the dual exhaust via a split-stock manifold before shifting through the stock three-speed trans for the first time since who knows when. When Randy first took ownership of the Dodge, he thought it'd be neat to stick a vintage Hemi under the split hood and build a sleeper, but after a few trips in the '47 he soon fell in love with its original prewar-based charm. (Dodge trucks didn't change much-like many makes-from 1939 to 1947, which are also referred to as the Job-Rated family of Dodges.)

Randy and his family drive the '47 as often as possible every week and relish the looks and conversations with curious onlookers at the local cruise. They also drive it in the Concord Christmas parade, where you can bet it's an impromptu thumb inspector. Maybe we all should think about putting a Dodge in our garage!